Josiah Warren Quotes
This circulating medium has a natural tendency to lessen by degrees the value and the use of money, and finally to render it powerless; and consequently to sweep away all the crushing masses of fraud, iniquity, cruelty, corruption and imposition that are built upon it.
Warren, Josiah. Manifesto. Self-published, 1841.
Conservatives are surprised to learn that their great economic nemesis was one of the early economists who saw the danger of paper money and government control over the minting of money which is one of their core concerns.
Later, William Jennings Bryan and the Populists turned this point into a major political issue. See Bryan’s Cross of Gold Speech.
Money was backed by gold then and therefore limited and the country was growing, and needed more money to finance development. But the only way to then have more money in circulation was for the government to borrow it from the people who had it—mostly wealthy people in the East and in England. These gold owners charged very high interest rates. However there was much more silver in the U. S. and more was being mined every day. So for many populists, the answer was to make silver a basis for money. But those who had gold backed money wanted to maintain the shortage of currency in the growing nation The populists naively thought that if there was sufficient money supply all other problems like labor strife would disappear. Some did when the money supply was finally expanded, but it was no panacea.
some of the 1 percent Not all of the superrich in America are like this. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the richest Americans, for example, are supporters of these important programs for many citizens. However, the Koch Brothers, Senator Sanders best example, had $87 Billion and earned $12 Billion more that year. Yet they also made great efforts and spend large sums of money to take away the Social Security, Medicaid.
What Franklin Delano Roosevelt began, President Nixon would in 1971 complete by removing America from the gold standard entirely and ending fixed rates of exchange. There have been those in government who did not understand the modern economics of money and who believed that currency had to have a fixed rate of exchange for gold or silver otherwise it was worthless. Roosevelt had to deal with them as did Nixon later. Even into the 21st century when it had been amply demonstrated that the best currency in the world was the United States dollar precisely because it was backed up by the full faith and credit of the United States Government, there were those who complain that United States money is not sound currency and argue for the return of the gold standard.
The Congressman was notorious for his extreme and unusual views of things. See {606976} for another of his extreme statements which turned out to be untrue. McFadden quotations are sometimes used to show that there is almost no limit to how absurd a view a politician in general, or a member of Congress in particular, might take and make public.
Summarizing his conclusions of the Judiciary Committee investigations regarding Wall Street and the bankers' role in the Great Depression:
Josiah Warren was an American individualist anarchist, inventor, musician, printer and author. He is regarded by some as the first American anarchist (although Warren never used the term anarchism himself) and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, the first anarchist periodical published, was an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and made his own printing plates.
